Sonita: The story of the Afghan girl fighting the Taliban with rap

A film documenting the extraordinary story of a young Afghan girl determined to make it in the hip hop industry

The Kering Foundation has kicked off the run up to its annual White Ribbon For Women day, with a special screening of Sonita, a film documenting the extraordinary story of a young Afghan girl determined to make it in the hip hop industry. Attended by Directors of the Kering Foundation, Salma Hayek Pinault and Stella McCartney, the screening promotes Kering’s message of the elimination of violence against women.

Sonita is no ordinary Afghan teenager. Like most, she has seen her family torn apart by war, her brother shot, lives in a world where the regular beating of young women is a social norm, and been forced to survive on the streets of an alien country just to escape the violence that envelopes her homeland. She has escaped the clutches of the Taliban by fleeing to Iran, but her ordeal is far from over – as a teenage girl she now faces the paralysing prospect of being forced to return to Afghanistan to be sold to her future husband. Yes, sold.

Sonita, however, has aspirations to refute and ultimately tear down this most disturbing of traditions. Sonita wants to be a rap artist. When she’s not writing starkly pointed lyrics about the very real injustice she faces, Sonita collages her face onto images of Nicki Minaj-style Western artists and dreams of having an American passport, where her parents are listed as Rihanna and Michael Jackson. In Iran, women are only permitted to sing in front of men as part of a chorus, which puts Sonita’s dream of performing her blisteringly honest lyrics on an international platform – “I am seen as a sheep grown only to be devoured” – “He tried to burn her, he tried to hit her with a brick” – in jeopardy.

Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami, the Iranian born director who brought her documentation of Sonita’s story to international acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival this year (Sonita won both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award for World Cinema Documetary), found herself a little more involved in Sonita’s story than is the filmmaker’s status quo. As Sonita, her sister, her teacher and Rokhsareh rack their brains trying to find the teenager an escape route from her impending forced marriage, the heart wrenching turning point of the film comes when Sonita looks up to Rokhsareh’s camera and asks, “Why don’t you buy me? In Afghanistan, a man can pay US dollars and buy me. What if you can pay, then I’d be free to make music. My music will sell and I will pay you back!”

Sonita is an arresting insight into a seemingly detourned, but worryingly common reality. Watching a teenage girl beg a forty-year-old woman to buy her is a surreal glimpse into the impossibly bleak plight of millions of intelligent, creative young women born into oppressive social norms.

The Kering Foundation, a charitable initiative set up by the CEO and Chairman of the luxury fashion group Francois-Henri Pinault, is committed to spreading awareness of the fact that 1 in 3 women will suffer physical or sexual abuse in their lifetime – and that 2 women are killed every week in England and Wales by their current or former partner. From 18 to 27 November, Kering Foundation will be distributing 230,000 White Ribbon brooches and stickers designed by its director Stella McCartney, in 800 Kering stores – including the likes of Gucci, Alexander McQueen and Brioni – across 51 countries. You can follow the hashtag #BeHerVoice across social media platforms to ensure the voices of women like Sonita are heard across the world.